Professional Geek

3rd November 20105th December 2014

A side scroller accessible to the blind

In my third year, I was asked to create a 2D game using Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio. Whilst learning how to do so I had to make up sprites, drawing graphics is not a strong point of mine so I used this as a major part of the game story line. I also wanted to make this game accessible to users who wouldn’t normally be able to play games. At the Dundee School of Computing Christmas Lecture 2009, Dr. Deborah Fels from Edinburgh’s Napier University demonstrated her research in inclusive games and this concept really caught my interest leaving me wanting to try something similar myself.

The audio assisted version of this game, I believe, is entirely playable by the blind. One sound is used to notify the user when an enemy ship is in their path and another noise is played to notify the user when an enemy bullet is approaching.

Battle of the Crudely Drawn Dimensions

Battle of the Crudely Drawn Dimensions is a side scrolling game based in a world contained in a dimension where everything appears to have been crudely drawn in a package such as MSPaint. Unlike side scrolling games from our own dimension, this side scroller is inverted in terms of direction. Our own player resides on the right hand side of the screen whilst enemy ships appear from the left hand side that we must shoot out of the sky.